"Sure, go ahead," Rhiow said.
Arhu reached out a paw and hooked one claw into one of the glowing control strings of the gate. The visible gate-locus vanished, leaving nothing behind it but the intricate, faint traces of hyperstring structure in the air.
And he's right about them not being little, Rhiow said privately, from her mind to Urruah's.
When even you notice that, o spayed one, Urruah said, it suggests that we may shortly have a problem on our hands.
Rhiow stifled a laugh, keeping her eye on Arhu as he studied the gate matrix, then sat up again and started slowly hooking strings out of the air to "reweave" the visible matrix. It surprises me that you would describe the concept of approaching sexual maturity as a problem.
Oh, it's not, not as his affects me anyway, Urruah said. We're in-pride now: he's safe with me— it helps that the relationship between you and me isn't physical. Though I do feel sorry for you, Urruah said, magnanimous.
Rhiow simply put her whiskers forward and accepted the implied compliment without comment. But for him, Urruah said, there's likely to be trouble coming. Hormonal surges don't sort well with the normal flow of wizardly practice.
I'm not sure there's going to be anything normal about his practice for a while, Rhiow said, dryly, as they watched the structure of the gate reassert itself in the air, rippling and flowing, wrinkling as if someone were pulling it out of shape from the edges. Arhu had not actually started his task on the gate yet, but he was thinking about it, and the gates were susceptible to the thoughts of the technicians who worked with them.
"Uh," Arhu said.
"Don't just pull it in all directions like a dead rat, for Iau's sake," Rhiow said, trying not to sound as impatient as she felt. "Take time to get your visualization sorted out first."
"Remember what I told you about visualizing the entire interweave of the gate's string structure as organized into five-stranded structures and groups of five," Urruah said. "Simplest that way: there are five major groupings of forces involved in worldgates, and besides, we have five claws on each paw, and these things are never accidental— "
"Wait a minute," Arhu said, sitting back again, but with a slightly suspicious look this time. "Are you trying to tell me that the whole species of People was built the way we are just so that we could be gate technicians?"
"Maybe not just for that purpose, no. But don't you find it a little strange that we're perfectly set up to handle strings physically, and that we can see them naturally, when no other species can?"
"The saurians can."
"That's a recent development," Rhiow said wearily. It was one of many "recent developments," which they were all slowly digesting. "Never mind that for now. No other species could. Meantime, do something before the thing defaults again."
"All right," Arhu said. "Group one is for phase relationships." He plucked that control string out as he named it, held it hooked behind one claw, and a series of strings in the matrix ran bright golden as he activated them. "Two is for..." He continued reciting the basics of string activation as Urruah listened, alert to any errors.
Arhu leaned in to bite the strings that he was having trouble managing with his paws. "Just be glad this is all you have to worry about at the moment," Urruah said. "Once we get up into second-order stuff, your head will hurt a lot worse than if I'd hit you for your rude mouth, which may come later. And don't think I can't hear you thinking, with your teeth and claws full of hyperstrings: you think the laws of science are broken, or I'm deaf? Thought runs down those things like water: that's partly what they're built for. All you have to worry about now is the path this piece of Earth is describing through space at the moment, and the path that the piece you're trying to gate to is describing. You keep them in sync while the gate's open, and that'll be more than a lot of wizards can do. It's a complex helical locus in motion, but no more complex than a trained Person can handle. Let's see how you do."
Rhiow sat and wondered how Urruah could sound so casual about the management of forces that, if Arhu let them slip, could peel the whole mass of Grand Central Terminal off its track-tunneled lower layers and toss it up into the stratosphere the way you would toss a new-killed rat. That was Urruah's teaching style, though, and it seemed to work with Arhu. Tom stuff, Rhiow thought, and kept her whiskers still; unwise to let the amusement show. For toms, it all comes down to blows and ragged ears in the end. Never mind: whatever works for them...
The weave of the gate before them suddenly shimmered and misted away to invisibility. They got a glimpse of light streaming golden through rustling green leaves, a bustle and rush of ehhif along a checkered black-and-white pavement before them: and suddenly, with a huge clangor of bells, a huge, boxy blue-and-white shape turned a corner in front of them and came rushing directly at the gate.
Arhu's eyes went wide: he yowled and threw himself backward, dropping the mouthful and double pawful of strings. The view through the gate vanished, leaving nothing but the snapped-back rainbow weave of the hyperstrings, buzzing slightly like strummed guitar strings in the dark air as they resonated off the energy that had built up in them while the gate was open.
Arhu lay on the cinders and panted. "What did I— I didn't— "
Rhiow yawned. "It was a tram."
"What?"
"A kind of bus," Rhiow said. "It runs on electricity; some ehhif cities use them. Don't ask me where that was, though."
"Blue-and-white tram," Urruah said. "Combined with that smell? That was Zürich."
"Urruah..."
"No, seriously. There's a butcher just down the road from there, on the Bahnhofstrasse, and they have this sausage that— "
"Urruah."
"What? What's the matter?"
Rhiow sighed. Urruah had four ruling passions: wizardry, food, sex, and o'hra. They jostled one another for precedence, but you could guarantee in any discussion with Urruah that at least one of them would come up, usually repeatedly. "We don't need to hear about the sausage," Rhiow said. "Was that the location you had set into the gate?"
"I didn't set a specific location. Just told it to hunt for population centers in the three-hundred-to-five-hundred-thousand range with gating affinities."
"Then you did good," Rhiow said to Arhu, "even if you did panic. You had 'here' and 'there' perfectly synchronized."
"Until I panicked." Arhu was washing now, with the quick, sullen movements of someone both embarrassed and angry.
"It didn't do any harm. You should always brace yourself, though, when opening a gate into a new location, even on visual-only. It's another good reason to make sure the gate defaults to invisible/intangible until you've got your coordinates solidified."
"Take a break," Urruah said. But Arhu turned back to the gate-weave and began hooking his claws into it again, in careful sequence.
Stubborn, Rhiow said silently to Urruah.
This isn't a bad thing, Urruah said. Stubborn can keep you alive, in our line of work, at times when smart may not be enough.
Rhiow switched her tail in agreement. They watched Arhu reconstruct the active matrix and pull out the strings again, two pawfuls of them: then he leaned in and carefully began taking hold of the next groups with his teeth, pulling them down one by one to join the ones already in his claws. The gate shimmered.
Traffic flowed by in both directions right before them, cars and buses in a steady stream, but there was something odd about the sight, regardless. In the background, beyond some lower buildings, two great square towers with pointed pyramidal tops stuck up: a roadway ran between them, and some kind of catwalk, high up.
"The cars are on the wrong side," Arhu said suddenly.
"Not wrong," Rhiow said, "just different. There are places on the planet where they don't drive the way ehhif here do."
"No one on the planet drives the way ehhif here do," Urruah muttered.
Rhiow put her whiskers forward in a smile. "No argument."
People were walking back and forth before what w
ould be the aperture of the gate, were it to open physically. "Look at them all," Arhu said, somewhat bemused. "It keeps coming up cities."
"It would whether Urruah had set the parameters that way or not," Rhiow said to Arhu. "Worldgates inhere to population centers."
Make it a little drier for him, why don't you? Urruah said good-humoredly into her mind as he looked out at the ehhif hurrying by. "See, Arhu, if you pack enough people of whatever species into a tight enough space, the fabric of physicality starts fraying from the pressure of all their minds intent on getting what they want. Pack even more of them in, up to the threshold number, and odd things start to happen routinely in that area as the spacetime continuum rubs thinner— places get a reputation for anything being available there, or at least possible. Go over the threshold number and gates start forming spontaneously."
"Much smaller populations can produce gates if they're there for long enough," Rhiow said. "The piled-up-population effect can be cumulative over time: there are settlements of ehhif that have been established for many thousands of years, and therefore have gates even though only a small population lives there at any one time."
"Catal Huyuk," Urruah said, "and Chur, places like that. Those old gates can be tricky, though: idiosyncratic... and over thousands of years, they pick up a lot of strange memories, not all of them good. The newer high-population-locus gates can be a lot safer to work with."
"What's the threshold number you were talking about?" Arhu asked, studying the gate.
"A variable, not a constant," Rhiow said. "It varies by species. For ehhif, it's around ten million. For People, eight hundred thousand, give or take a tail."
Arhu flirted his own tail, a gesture of disbelief. "Where would you get that many People?"
"Right here in this city, for one place," Rhiow said. "All those 'pets,' all those 'strays' "—the words she used were rhao'ehhih'h and aihlhih, "human-denned" and "nonaligned." "There might be as many as a million of us just in this island. Either way, there's more than enough of us to sustain a gating complex without ehhif being involved... and they're here too. With such big joint populations, it's no surprise that this complex is the most senior one in the planet."
"And besides, there's the 'master' gating connection to the Downside," Urruah said. "Every worldgate on the planet has 'affectional' connections to it: for all we know, its presence made it possible for all the other gates to spawn."
Arhu shook his head. "What's this city, then?"
"London," Urruah said.
"Don't tell me... you can smell the local butcher."
Urruah took a swipe at Rhiow, which she ducked with her whiskers forward, amused to have successfully put a claw into his near-impervious ego. "As it happens," Urruah said, "I recognize the landscape. That's Tower Bridge back there."
Rhiow looked at the bridge between the two towers: it was starting to rise in two pieces, to let a ship past. "Isn't that the one the ehhif have a rhyme about? It fell down...."
"Wrong bridge. This is a younger one; the location it serves started developing gates around the beginning of the last millennium, when the last bunch of ehhif with a big empire came through."
"The 'Hrromh'ans.' "
"That's right."
"Not a very old complex, then," Rhiow said.
"Nope. A little finicky, this one. The population pressure built up around it in fits and starts rather than steadily, and it kept losing population abruptly— the city kept getting sacked, having plagues and fires, things like that. The matrices formed under touchy circumstances. But the Tower Bridge complex is good for long-range transits: better than ours, even. No one's sure why. Convergence of ley lines, gravitic anomalies under that hill close to the bridge, who knows?" Urruah waved his tail. "Leave it to the theorists."
"Like you, now."
He put his whiskers forward, but the expression in his eyes was ironic. "Well, we're all diversifying a little at the moment, aren't we? Not that we have much choice."
"You miss her too," Rhiow said softly.
Urruah watched Arhu for a little, and then said, "She used to go on and on about these little details. Now I wonder whether she had a hint of what was going to happen...."
"The interesting thing," Rhiow said, "is that you remembered all this."
He looked at her sidewise. "Shouldn't surprise you. 'He lives in a Dumpster, he's got a brain like a Dumpster,' isn't that what you always say?"
"I never say that," Rhiow said, scandalized, having often thought that very thing.
"Huh," Urruah said, and his whiskers went farther forward. "Anyway, this complex handles a lot of offplanet work— emergency interventions, and the routine training and cultural exchange transits involving wizards here and elsewhere in the Local Group of galaxies. Bigger scheduled transits than that tend to go to Chur or Alexandria or Beijing, to keep Tower Bridge from getting overloaded, Saash told me. It overloads easily— something to do with the forces tangled around that hill with the old castle on it."
"Should I try somewhere else?" Arhu said, now bored with looking at the traffic.
"Sure, go ahead," Rhiow said, waving her tail in casual assent, and Arhu sat up on his haunches again and hooked his claws into the control matrix, while Rhiow looked thoughtfully for a moment more at that old tower. There were a lot of physical places associated with ehhif that acquired personality artifact over many years, probably as a result of the ehhif tendency to stay in one place for generations. People didn't do that, as a rule, and found the prospect slightly pathological: but there was no use judging one species by another's standards— the One doubtless had Her reasons for designing them differently. Ten lives on, maybe we'll all be told.
"It's stuck," Arhu said suddenly.
"What? Stuck how?"
"I don't know. It's just stuck."
Urruah got up and stalked over to look the gate-web up and down. To a Person's eyes, its underweave, the warp and woof of interwoven hyperstrings that produced the gating effect, was still plainly visible through the image of sunshine on that other landscape, the tangle of buildings and traffic beyond. Arhu was sitting up with the brilliant strings of the "control weave" now stretched again between his paws, pulled taut and in the correct configuration for viewing. "Look," Arhu said, and twisted his paws so that the weave changed configuration, went much more "open," a maneuver that should have shut down the gate to the bare matrix again.
The gate just hung there, untroubled and unmoved, and showed the bridge and the traffic, and the ehhif hurrying by.
Rhiow came up beside Urruah. "Do it again."
"I can't, not from this configuration, anyway."
"I mean take that last move back, then reexecute."
Arhu did.
Nothing changed. The morning was bright, and shone on the bridge and the river.
"Let me try," Urruah said.
"Why?" Rhiow said. "He did it right."
Urruah looked at her in astonishment. "Well, he..."
"He did it right. Let's not rush to judgment: let's have a look at this."
They all did. The strings looked all right, but something else was the matter: nothing that they could see. As she peered at the view, and the gate, Rhiow started to get the feeling that someone was looking over her shoulder...
... and then realized that Someone was. She did not have to look to see: she knew Who it was.
There's a problem, the voice whispered in her ear.
Urruah's ears flicked: nothing to do with the ambient noise. Arhu's eyes went wide. He was still adjusting to hearing the Whisperer. It took some getting used to, for the voice in your mind sounded like your own thought, except that it was not. It plainly came from somewhere else, and at first the feeling could be as bizarre as feeling someone else switch your tail.
Rhiow's was switching now, without help. Well, madam, she thought, do You know what this problem is?
The gate with which yours is presently in affinity is malfunctioning, said the silent voice inside their hea
ds. The London gating team requires your assistance; they will be expecting you. You should leave as soon as you can make arrangements for covering your own territory during your absence.
And that was it: the voice was silent, the presence gone, as suddenly as it had come.
Arhu blinked, though this time he didn't drop the strings. "What did She mean?" he said. "And where is London exactly?"
"About a tenth of the way around the planet," Rhiow said, glancing at the bridge again. "Look in that fourth group of strings and you'll see the coordinates."
"You mean we have to go away?"
"That's what She said," said Urruah, dismayed. "To London, yet."
"I would have thought you'd be happy, 'Ruah," Rhiow said, slightly amused despite her own surprise and concern. "The butchers and all."
"When you're visiting, that's one thing," Urruah said, sitting down and licking his nose. "Working, that's something else. It wasn't so much fun the last time."
"We have to go work on someone else's gates?" Arhu said, letting the strings go, carefully, one at a time. "And you did this before?"
"We had to go help a team in Tokyo," said Rhiow, "halfway around the planet: it was about a sunround and a half ago. We were there for nearly three weeks. It was something of a logistical nightmare, but we got the job done."
" 'Something' of a nightmare!" Urruah muttered, and lay down on the platform, looking across at the commuters as they came and went. "You have a talent for understatement."
"There's no telling how long we'll be gone on one of these consultational trips," Rhiow said, "but they're not normally brief. Usually we're only called in for consultation when the local team has exhausted all its other options and still hasn't solved the problem."
"Why us, though?" Arhu said.
"We're the senior gating team on the planet," Urruah said, "because we work with Grand Central. It's not that we're all that much better at the job than anyone else"—and Rhiow blinked at this sudden access of humility from Urruah— "but the main gating matrices in the Old Downside are the oldest functioning worldgate complex on the planet. All the other gating complexes that have since come into being have 'affinity' links through Grand Central to the Downside matrices."